Wen Jiabao

Long before most investors could buy Ping An stock, Taihong, a company that would soon be controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives, acquired a large stake in Ping An from state-owned entities that held shares in the insurer, regulatory and corporate records show. And by all appearances, Taihong got a sweet deal. The shares were bought in December 2002 for one-quarter of the price that another big investor — the British bank HSBC Holdings — paid for its shares just two months earlier, according to interviews and public filings.

By June 2004, the shares held by the Wen relatives had already quadrupled in value, even before the company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. And by 2007, the initial $65 million investment made by Taihong would be worth $3.7 billion.

Corporate records show that the relatives’ stake of that investment most likely peaked at $2.2 billion in late 2007, the last year in which Taihong’s shareholder records were publicly available. Because the company is no longer listed in Ping An’s public filings, it is unclear if the relatives continue to hold shares.

It is also not known whether Mr. Wen or the central bank chief at the time, Dai Xianglong, personally intervened on behalf of Ping An’s request for a waiver, or if Mr. Wen was even aware of the stakes held by his relatives.

But internal Ping An documents, government filings and interviews with bankers and former senior executives at Ping An indicate that both the vice premier’s office and the central bank were among the regulators involved in the Ping An waiver meetings and who had the authority to sign off on the waiver.

Background

Before becoming prime minister, Mr. Wen was a number-crunching chief of staff who self-effacingly served China’s top leaders for two decades.

Like his superior, Hu Jintao, Mr. Wen scaled the one-party political hierarchy leaving few footprints and making no known enemies. People who worked with him early in his tenure described him as being conspicuous mainly for being fastidious. He lets policy documents sit on his desk for at least three days before signing off, they say, so he can slow-cook the contents in his mind and triple-check the grammar.

But after a series of high-profile visits to victims of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, he began to be known for a populist touch rare among the Communist Party’s leadership.

In 2011, Mr. Wen appeared to press for political reform, though analysts are uncertain about whether he was pushing on his own or with the support of a broader segment of the nation’s leadership.

In January 2011, the 68-year-old prime minister appeared at the nation’s top petition bureau in Beijing, where ordinary people go to file grievances, and encouraged citizens to criticize the government and press their cases for justice.

“We are the people’s government and our power is vested upon us by the people,” the prime minister said during the visit, according to state-run news media. “We should use the power in our hands to serve the interest of the people, helping them to tackle difficulties in a responsible way.”

The key factor was the setting. The national petition bureau is known as a lightning rod for anger about official corruption, illegal land seizures, labor disputes and complaints of all sort, the kind of problems that reveal China’s continuing weakness on the rule of law. In a nation that fiercely snuffs out any sign of dissent or challenges to the ruling Communist Party, the government sometimes deems it appropriate to detain petitioners here or to forcibly send them back home.

But the state-run news media showed images of the prime minister meeting two days earlier with a small group of petitioners at the bureau, officially known as the State Bureau for Letters and Calls. The state-controlled media reports said he encouraged government workers to handle the petitioner cases properly.

Mr. Wen also instructed officials to make it easier for citizens to criticize and monitor the government. The reports said it was the first time a prime minister had appeared at the bureau to meet ordinary petitioners since the founding of the Communist state in 1949.

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